Studio Two Three has been around long enough to forget how likely it was to fail. I’ve been around long enough to document hundreds of organizations and businesses that didn’t make it, and there’s always a bit of luck involved when one lasts.
Sixteen years ago, a small group of friends wanted to keep making art in Richmond. They pooled money from working in local restaurants to pay rent, borrowed equipment and built an organization one piece at a time.
Today, Studio Two Three has 150 artist members, a 24-hour workspace and a community space that is home to film screenings, art shows, live music, union organizing, political conversations and, sometimes, square dancing.
Somewhere along the way, Studio Two Three also became more comfortable saying what needs to be said. Navigating that is an ongoing process.
I sat down with Studio Two Three co-founder and Executive Director Ashley Hawkins and Director of Community Partnerships and Development Kate Fowler and started with a basic question.
R. Anthony Harris: What role does Studio Two Three play within the community in your mind?
Ashley Hawkins: I think we’re in our 16th year now, and starting really small, creating a room about this size for women to continue making artwork. There was always an overlay of media creation and propaganda to some degree because it was printmaking, and that was by nature what we were able to do.
But really it was carving out a space for artists like ourselves to be able to keep making work in Richmond in a way that was accessible and not cost prohibitive.
Sixteen years later, there’s 150 artist members in the space, so clearly that was a need.
Before the interview, you mentioned physical space and the creation of physical media, and I think that’s a huge role that we’re filling right now. Within our print shops, providing a space for artist members to make their own work, to make our own work as an organization and as individual artists, and then above and beyond that, the community event space, where people are actually coming together.
We’re able to make that available to folks that are mission aligned, that are doing good work in the community that wouldn’t otherwise have resources to do it. It’s been really meaningful to watch things grow and blossom and either thrive within our space or then go on to get spaces of their own.
I kind of operate on a “more the merrier” mentality for people in our community who are doing good work and doing important things. If we have the resources to give, then it’s our goal to give them.
Anthony: Did it always have an activist element to it? You said it started with female artists and that, in my mind, automatically already lends itself to some form of activism. Sixteen years later, I would say you and a few other organizations are kind of at the center of this conversation around activism in Richmond.
But you also mix in really fun things.
Kate Fowler: [laughs] As it should be.
Anthony: You have to have the fun to relieve some of that stress, but the fun brings in people who might feel like there’s a barrier to walking into a situation where everybody is so serious.
Ashley: There’s the notion of the seriousness of play, right? If you’re walking into something where there’s a lot of self-seriousness, nobody wants to go there. [laughs]
Kate: The four women were just four buddies. It wasn’t a political statement to have women at first. It was just like, those were the people there.
It’s something we’ve been talking about a lot recently. We had this thought like, okay, well, you know, we’re reaching our 40s, and one day we’re just going to be gone. And what’s going to happen to the organization when a new director comes in and new leadership says, like, “Well, we’re not going to do the free event space anymore”?
And so we were like, okay, how do we write into our bylaws that these are our values and try to, like, force future leadership to hold them?
And then at some point we’re like, oh, organizations kind of exist in a place and a time with the people who lead it. And it’s like there’s been this moment where both of us are realizing, like, this is now. This is what we get to do. This is what we get to shape.
And at some point when we step away, whoever comes next could shut it down, or do X, Y, or Z, and we have very little control over it.
So much of it is using the tools we have right now to kind of build a community that we want to be a part of and to have the programming that we dream of seeing and that we love.
And also, a lot of the people who are organizing in this space, whether it’s like union organizing or film screenings, are just younger than us. And so they’re kind of, like, getting their chops now in a place that’s free, where they can kind of fail and take risks without hemorrhaging money.
And so part of our responsibility is like, maybe they’re going to be the next people to lead Studio Two Three and make decisions.
But I think the whole staff happens to be political and creative, and so we just kind of bring our personal selves into the work. And it’s really changed over time.
There was a time where the organization was more scared about making its stance known for fear of blowback, but it’s also when the organization was more vulnerable. If funding was lost, then Studio Two Three could have shut down.
But we spent a long time figuring out how we can not have corporations paying for us to exist and how we can say yes or no.
We’ve had funders pull back publicly and demand that their name go off of our website. One funder, after we wrote something for Style about VCU and Palestine, tried to organize donors in Richmond and other funders to boycott Studio Two Three.
They were calling people on the phone, and some of our donors called and said, “Hey, did you know they’re specifically asking people to join a boycott?”
What can you do? You just have to put one foot in front of the other.
Ashley: You know, thinking about the seasonality of an organization and being an organization that started like, we had no money. We were sharing bartending and serving tips to pay rent at Plant Zero and borrowing equipment.
At the time, and for many years, it felt like, “Oh God, there are so many organizations that have so much more than us. We wish we had that big grant. We wish we had a singular funder to make this happen.”
In retrospect, I’m so glad that we didn’t.
We’ve always had a lot of our own earned income through memberships and classes and retail sales. And when folks invest, we don’t ever assume that it’s permanent or that the strings attached are going to be able to control what we do as an organization.
We really try to act with integrity because there are stakes. And at the end of the day, it’s like, knock on wood, the stakes have never been so high in recent years at least. Speaking clearly and holding our values in a public way has risked the entire future of the organization.
It’s our job to ensure that the organization is healthy and is able to be here for our community. But it’s also our job to tell the truth.
Kate: And who would we be? I mean, at this point, there can be many arts organizations, and there are a lot of big-tent organizations that play really valuable roles. But not every arts organization needs to be big-tent, you know? There need to be people who are really clear about our place and time.
And we are, like, so specifically of Richmond, so we feel like it’s important to speak honestly about what’s happening in Richmond and to take a look at it and to kind of push back on the institutions that formed us.
Like, almost everyone went to VCU, and so it’s like we actually have a responsibility as people who graduated from and were shaped by that institution to think critically about our relationship to it and its relationship to the city and politics and young people today.
Anthony: Yeah, I feel all that. When you’re in a vulnerable financial situation, it’s hard to speak out. I mean, the mag also went through the same process, and I still deal with that, but try to add another voice because when I see stories that are not told, it’s kind of, “Oh yeah, we should try to tell that story.”
And then, I’m also kind of in that phase of getting new voices in and allowing them to have space without being overly judgmental or, trying to be like, “Don’t do that!” Just try to understand what they’re going through and maybe what they need to gain some confidence because they’re the ones that are going to lead the next phase of the city someday.
Kate: Also, for young folks, the risk is so much higher now for, like, putting yourself out there. The level of perfection that’s demanded is so high. And, I look at these film groups who are organizing at the studio, and they’re paying to license these films when forever we’ve just been doing free community events and not licensing films. But they have this incredible integrity. There’s a lot of rigor.
They’re also hiring artists and paying them to design these incredible flyers. And so the amount of work that is going into hosting these things and the amount of scrutiny that everybody is facing, like, “Where did your poster come from? How was it made?” There’s just a high level, and I think they’re operating in it.
And what I hope is that younger folks don’t burn out in the process of perfection, and that they leave some space for errors and mistakes, and also just hold to the value of what they’re doing without the demand of everything being exactly right.
Anthony: Maybe give themselves some grace. Give yourself some grace.
Kate: And people give them grace.
That independence matters because the Richmond Studio Two Three was created in isn’t really the Richmond young artists are inheriting today.
We had room to fail. I’m not sure Richmond still does.
Anthony: Maybe it’s becoming so unaffordable that organizations like ours aren’t as possible anymore. I was paying something like $275 in rent. I lived with four other people. I was rolling sushi. I could kind of do whatever I wanted because I could afford to. I could take a chance by starting the mag. I don’t know if that is possible now.
Ashley: Totally. I was funding my rent with two-dollar Tuesdays at Starlite and that meant I could put 300 bucks into the print shop and buy paper and ink.
If you have no pennies to rub together, you can’t throw them at the thing that you care about.
Thinking about the event space and even doing free memberships for artists, we really believe that people should have the ability to follow things that they’re passionate about and to build the world that they want to see. It’s really hard to do if you are in desperate financial straits.
Anthony: And paying $2,000 in rent versus $300 is a huge deal. Everything else is more expensive too. So what worries you the most about Richmond right now?
Kate: Front of mind for me, we’re really worried about Code Refresh passing. We want to see more housing that’s affordable in the city for people to stay and live.
And I think I’m really worried about VCU right now. I lived in a very rural place in eastern Kentucky, and one of the things I learned living there is that it’s really hard to keep young people if you don’t have a university centered right in that space.
We’ve been really lucky to have an art school here, and it anchors creativity.
Seeing VCU consolidate their departments and seeing the way they’re treating their adjunct professors is really distressing. We interact with a lot of students. They’re interns here. To know what their experience is and how much they’re being charged, it’s like that culture shift in Richmond overall of it costing more, people receiving less, is distressing to me as an artist and somebody who thinks Richmond is awesome.
I think it’s just a really culturally unique space, and I want it to stay that way. But it’s going to take some real intentionality about affordability, holding our institutions accountable, including all of us, making sure that we continue to be rigorous and engaged and open-hearted, and, you know, making sure that these programs aren’t just consolidating, taking money from people and providing less, and also exploiting their teachers.
So I think that’s front and center on my mind. It’s like, how are our institutions aging, and what are we doing with the power that we get as we get a little bit older and further into the game?
And we’re still young. We’re at the peak of what we’re doing, right? But, like, we are kind of putting our eye out there to see what other organizations are popping up, who’s doing cool shit, and how can we start showing up for their organizations and helping to move them forward?
Ashley: What you’re speaking to around affordability is the constriction of possibility that goes with that.
We started Studio Two Three because we wanted people to stay in Richmond. We love this city, and there wasn’t a resource like it for artists. We were seeing people graduate from VCU and leave for bigger cities because there were more options available to them.
It felt like there was an expansiveness of possibility. People could see an opening and they could build something meaningful, and they could do it within the scope of their lives without losing everything in order to do it.
How do we hold that expansiveness of possibility for folks who are coming after us? And how do we play a role in that? Because it’s obviously going to be a huge collective effort, but I think all of those things you go back to making a place that’s attainable.
Affordability is one thing that has changed since Studio Two Three started. Social media is another. For organizations like the studio and the mag, it’s how we distribute our work, find audiences and maintain community connections every day.
It has also created a public space where disagreements can turn ugly.
Studio Two Three hasn’t escaped that. If anything, the organization’s willingness to take positions on housing, VCU, Palestine and other local issues has occasionally made it a target. And not only from familiar local voices. Like us, they’ve seen hot-button issues draw waves of mysterious commenters who seem less interested in the conversation than in fueling the conflict.
Over time, Ashley and Kate have developed a time-tested, old-school strategy for dealing with it.
Anthony: That leads into why I wanted to talk with you both. I saw a post, and you were going back and forth with these comment bots. You were joking about …
Kate: [laughs] beefing.
Anthony: Beefing with these bots! Which should be…
Kate: [laughs] That’s a great title for this story, Studio Two Three Beefing with Bots!
Anthony: How do you deal with that on the day to day of knowing that you are highlighting and allowing these conversations to happen in the space, and then having to deal with the negativity that happens on social media? Like, how do you keep your mental health in that?
Kate: I think we do a few things, and we haven’t always been really good at it.
For us, you know, we really believe, and we talk about this a lot, that people have a lot of online literacy.
So the thing that I always say to Ashley, and the thing I genuinely believe, is that most people can see when other people are behaving badly, even if they don’t say it. It’ll kind of go inside of you, and it won’t sit right.
And so it’s like I believe in letting people kind of say their worst-impulse thing or go on the attack and be really incendiary, and that it’s transparent to everyone that they’re not putting their thought or their heart into it, or that they’re trying to gain clout by shaming or humiliating a person. Like, they’re coming in bad faith.
There’s an ick test that all of us, when we’re looking at social media, we might be drawn to conflict and we want to read the comments, but we kind of know when somebody is being awful.
And so I stand behind that. If we truly believe in what we’re saying, if we’re operating with internal clarity and we’re trying to come from a moral place, people can kind of get as angry as they want. But as long as we believe in what we’re saying, that should be obvious. And if somebody is trying to humiliate us, that also should be obvious.
And so I think it’s been a lot of learning for us not to be afraid of the online takedown, because at this point, we really try to show up. We try really hard to be honest and to operate with integrity.
And if we fail, you know, we try to step forward into that failure and talk about it openly.
Years ago, we had a map that we commissioned, and it just really excluded core parts of Richmond that were primarily Black neighborhoods and low-income. And, you know, some people sent messages, and there are two ways you can go: you can hide and try to obfuscate, or you can just step forward and say, like, “This is where we were, this is where we are today, and here’s how we’re going to move forward.”
And so I think we’ve really tried to operate with, rather than hiding, always being willing to kind of step into the fullness of what we see or believe, or what we’ve been called on, rightfully, if there’s a gap.
And we’ve also been really lucky that when we fuck up, a lot of people just pick up the phone or talk to us [in person] and tell us how they’re feeling.
Also, you know, the culture shift. I think for us, and this is kind of what you wanted to speak to, changing the way we respond on social media and the way people engage with each other in our community.
I don’t know if you’ve seen a tone change with us, but at first it was like, “Oh no, we’re sorry. We said this thing that offended you.”
We’ve really started to shift to a position of, when we feel clear about something, actually pushing back publicly and not being afraid of cancellation. And part of the reason we’ve done it is that people are kind of eating each other up. They’re shutting down progressive organizing efforts. They’re kind of pushing each other’s cultural efforts into the ground, and it’s happening in our community.
And so part of it is, like, we all need to collectively be able to step forward and assess when somebody is actually really bad or when they’ve just annoyed somebody, when somebody has actually harmed somebody else, or if they’ve just been a normal community member, you know, existing in the world.
And we actually had something happen months ago, maybe a year ago. There was this huge callout of another organization, and people just started tagging us to call them out. Like, literally, we had nothing to do with them. We weren’t organizing with them. We’ve hardly ever worked with them. They’re just another organization in the city.
And we started getting prodded and kind of snowballed into this callout that was like, “We are now calling out Studio Two Three for not calling out this organization.”
And we just absolutely refused to do it, and the pressure continued mounting.
Finally, what we decided to do was pick up the phone and call the people who were leading this and say, “What are you doing? Why are you pressuring us? But also, we don’t agree with your tactics. We don’t like what you’re doing.”
And so we ended up calling, like, five different people involved with it, and they were literally shocked to receive a phone call. It was as though we were being the aggressors for calling.
And we’re like, “Yo, if you can’t pick up the phone, and if you can publicly pressure people online to agree with your tactics, but you can’t sit on a phone call and defend why you’re telling people to be violent or why you’re using racist language to describe somebody, we don’t know how to work with you.”
And so we’ve tried to be really clear. We now have a policy that’s just like: pick up the phone and call somebody.
Ashley: It’s extremely illuminating when somebody is very comfortable in a comment section or behind an Instagram post, but they’re cowering on a phone call when you’re saying, “Hey, what’s going on?”
Kate: Call people.
Yeah, and we also like the other groups who were glomming on. We called them too and said, “Why are you doing this? How did this person affect you?” And so that was also like, you know, we just were trying to do the thing of like, rather than hiding and feeling like if Studio Two Three doesn’t call out this organization, we’re going to lose some kind of social power. It’s like, what kind of social power is that to be gained if we’re hurting another organization?
I feel like we’re becoming, as we get older, a little more confident in just saying no. Get called out. Let the fishbowl people go around one time, then they forget about it and move on.
We just let it play out now.
Ashley: It’s, like, conflict-based. It’s attention-seeking, and when that happens, we do the lateral punch thing, and then we pull our little chair up and we feel good because we’ve asserted some degree of power over somebody who’s in an equal or a lesser position than us.
And it’s like, ah, we should be punching up, you know? Like, why are we not punching up? Why are we doing this?
And I think that’s a lens for me when we get into these imbroglios. It’s like, oh, are they actually trying to build something meaningful in the world? Like, what is the end goal here?
Studio Two Three isn’t simply providing a building where people make art. The way the place itself operates is part of the philosophy.
Members have 24-hour access, people share equipment and they take responsibility for the space. When something goes wrong, the first instinct isn’t necessarily to find an authority to fix it for them. They take that on themselves as a group.
It’s built around a fairly radical proposition: give people some ownership over a community and, most of the time, they’ll take care of it.
Anthony: Last question for you. It’s been 16 years. Is Studio Two Three what you imagined it would be when you started?
Ashley: At first, it’s three feet in front of you, and it was not getting kicked out of our 400-square-foot studio because we couldn’t pay the rent.
Anthony: But when you were drafting a mission, when you went to grad school, what did you envision when you actually said, “This will become an organization?”
Ashley: I think the artist studio element of it, yes. Like, it’s that on steroids. I think having this space has really been transformative, but the idea of people coming in 24/7 and making work in the middle of the night and learning from each other and getting into arguments over, you know, who left the class with all the ink on the sink, that dynamic was the dream.
And then I think the overlay of building community power and using artistic voices within a civic environment has been kind of a thread that was not clearly expressed initially. It was like a gut feeling of a bunch of dirty little punk kids that were like, “Yeah, we have something to say.” We weren’t sure what the thing was that we were saying, but over time I think that has come.
I think just one foot in front of the other, and with you [looking at Kate] coming on when you did, I think having somebody in a co-leadership position who has the vision and I can hunker down with and do the spreadsheet. And that dynamic has been hugely transformative for us because, you know, half the time I’d be crunching my numbers.
Kate: I also think the radical politics of starting the place that you held 24/7 at the beginning is actually the radical thing that made all this possible. I think it’s still, to this day, the thing that shocks people, that everybody gets a key code and that we’re like, “We’re not going to call the cops, and we’re going to work it out if somebody steals.”
To have those politics is what has guided the growth of the entire space because you have to start with radical trust to say, like, “We’re just going to all own this thing and try to do the right thing here.”
Ashley: It’s a collective product of what we make of it.
Kate: When people have failed to meet the expectations, we’ve had to sit down and have really awkward conversations. That’s an ongoing process. But overall, most people are good, and they want to do the right thing and take care of the space.
Ashley: And hold each other accountable. And I think about getting off-screen and in real life. It’s a lot easier when you know somebody as a human being to be like, “Hey, dude, you took my T-shirts,” or whatever that is.
It’s like you can have a real conversation because you’ve interacted in a physical space. You’re sharing resources, and there is a real shared sense of ownership of the space. People care about it, and they’re here late at night, and when something goes wrong, they call us. Or, if somebody’s here doing weird shit, they tell them to skedaddle.
So, in essence, we’re a staff of four, but there are 25 additional people who are here pretty much all the time, caring for the space and building that community.
And, you know, thinking of seasonality, that’s been a different group over the years. But I do think the 24/7 nature of it is core to the organization, and it actually allows it to be the product of the people that are in it.
Anthony: [sarcastically] Are you saying that if people have an investment in something collectively, they’ll figure out how to self-police and govern effectively?
Kate: Totally. We’ve had maybe five events where it was like, “What the fuck are you doing?” But we’ve had hundreds.
Ashley: We had 278 events last year. People clean the space. They message us. They let us know when things are broken. Our projector broke, and the Hard Light folks held a fundraiser to buy us a new one.
There’s an incentive for the space to continue functioning for people. There’s a self-interest there, and then there’s the shared community of working within it.
People tend to it and care for it.
Anthony: I hadn’t really thought about it this way until you said that, but the way this space functions feels a little like the way you would like the city to function. We’re all invested in it. Everybody should benefit from it in some way. And maybe benefiting at the expense of everybody else isn’t what we want as a community.
Is that the radical idea?
Kate: Yeah. Put your sweat equity into it. Care about it. Show up. Earn it. If you’re unsure about things like Code Refresh or whatever big issue is facing us, actually just go there and see it. And then if you still feel some sort of way, you know you really believe it.
We’ve got to get out from behind the phones and show up in a place.
Ashley: The purity, perfect-alignment expectation has to go. If we agree about 90 percent of things and 10 percent I want to fistfight you over, I’ve got to set the 10 percent away and work with you on the 90 percent.
Where can we be aligned? What can we drive forward together?
And then where do I know that you’re going to have to do your own thing and I’m going to be over here?
When we expect people to be in perfect alignment with us all the time, we’re destined to fail. Because it’s absolutely not going to happen.
Photos by R. Anthony Harris
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